


Roadkill

by WeCanDance



Category: Villainous (Cartoon)
Genre: Action, Angst, Blood, Bonding, But not on any living human, Dem likes gross shit, Dissection, Flug likes science, Gen, Gore, In this they find common ground, Necropsy, The gorey part is actually the happy part of the fic, They really hate each other in canon huh, a lot of gore, solution: gore!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:02:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22646857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeCanDance/pseuds/WeCanDance
Summary: Flug and Demencia don't get usually along. But they can learn something from each other as they bond over a deer carcass.
Relationships: Demencia & Dr. Flug (Villainous)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 32





	1. BOOM

A series of explosions cracked and boomed inside the van as it hurtled down the highway, too fast and blind to stop. 

Pink and green colored lights burst inside the cabin, them and their resulting smoke completely obscuring the driver’s vision. Pops and bangs accompanied a manic cackle in his ears, shocking him into pulling the steering wheel left, screeching into the wrong lane and leaving skid marks in its wake. The pair in the car felt the harsh vibrations of the rumble strip as the two left wheels went off the road. Any further and they’d tumble down a muddy embankment and into a river, water rushing and high with the spring thaw.

“Wahoo!” his passenger cried out, as though they were on some sort of roller coaster. The driver gripped the steering wheel like a vice as the smoke cleared just enough to see white lights ahead of them-- _ coming towards them.  _ He yanked the wheel back to the right so fast that the right wheels lifted off the ground, letting out another ghastly shriek. The driver gritted his teeth and leaned as far right as he could, as though his 135-pound body could balance out a van fully loaded with contraband. In his desperation to escape oncoming traffic, he overshot his own lane, and the vehicle rumbled down onto a grassy, muddy bank. Cargo dislodged itself in the back and clattered to the floor. The insane woman in the passenger’s seat gripped the handle above the door, lifting herself above her seat and swinging with the chaotic turbulence of the vehicle. 

Clumps of mud and grass flew over them. Something brown and heavy launched upwards in front of them, bouncing over the hood, hitting the windshield and crunching a depression into the middle of it. Part of the projectile punctured the glass, sending shards into both passengers, raining bits onto their bodies, the seats, and the floor. With the car still in forward motion, the unidentified jumping object continued to tumble backward over the top of the van, its body banging on the metal roof, leaving blood on the jagged edges of what remained of the windshield. 

A minute after the explosion, in a field with a shattered windshield, mud and blood splattered all over the front of the car, and deep tire tracks behind them, the van finally slowed down and stopped as the panicked man found the brake. 

Parked in the middle of a grassy field, Flug panted heavily, hands still locked on the steering wheel even as his knuckles, embedded with glass, bled. Demencia giggled and threw the empty fireworks container out the smashed window. 


	2. Stillness

“Again! Again!” Demencia squeaked as she bounced in her seat like a child. 

Flug continued to look ahead, breathing deeply. Demencia elbowed him roughly and he let go of the wheel, turning to her with a scowl that she couldn’t see, even though there were small rips in his mask.

He groaned and looked outside again. They were in a green, muddy field beside the road, dotted with occasional sycamores. It was lucky they hadn’t hit one of the trees. 

“So, you’re ok?” he asked, although his passenger certainly seemed fine. He looked her up and down and saw no lacerations. She shook like a dog to get the glass out of her hair.

“Better than ok! That was fun!”

He then turned back to check on the cargo. There were a few items on the floor, but they hadn’t been set off--of course, if they had, neither of them would be around to worry about it. 

Third, he looked down at himself. Shards of glass--twenty-one, he counted--protruded from his tan canvas jacket, in his chest and arm. He picked them out and flicked them onto the floor, tuning out Demencia’s rambling. Only three pieces had penetrated through his skin, and hardly an inch deep. His fingers, though, caught a lot more glass, being closer to the shattering. He curled his hands in front of him, rotating them to scope the damage, and sighed. 

Flug carefully pulled his cellphone from his breast pocket and saw that one of the shards was embedded in the back of the case. Lucky he had put the phone in his pocket right over his heart. He texted programming instructions to one of his flying hatbots, directing it to bring a new windshield and one of his portable toolkits to their location. 

“OK, Dem,” he interrupted whatever she was saying. His voice was eerily calm. “A Hatbot should be here in an hour to help us. Then I have one hour to fix this and one hour to get to the depot. Do you have any other fireworks or flammables or shenanigans that could kill us?”

Demencia sat like a dog, with her hands together and placed in the middle of the seat between her legs. Smiling, she shook her head “no.” 

“Are you going to need me to do anything in the next hour while we wait?”

“Eh. Nah.”

  
“OK then. Feel free to entertain yourself with the mud or the grass or whatever while we wait. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take this opportunity to have a panic attack.” 


	3. Survivors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> character development *jazz hands*

Oh boy, this was going to be good. 

Flug was about to lose his shit, and Demencia tittered and scrambled for her phone to record it.

Whenever Flug freaked out, he would wave his arms, shout, and pace. Watching someone so organized and business-oriented devolve into a ranting, emotional nerd was almost as fun as the chaos that caused it. Jeez, it took almost nothing to set him off. Fucking  _ fireworks _ in a van full of  _ explosives _ was just off the rails. 

Demencia pressed the “record” button and aimed it at her partner in crime. She bounced with excitement as the scientist clenched and unclenched his hands. Staring straight out into meadow, a little fog setting in over the grass. Demencia continued to grin as the scientist closed his fists then put them on his forehead, and leaned forward with his elbows against the top of the steering wheel. Ultimately, she figured she was doing him a favor; he had to get used to things going wrong, _really_ wrong, and eventually he would see that smaller inconveniences were not that bad. It was like exposure therapy, and eventually he would chill out. 

Flug breathed audibly and slowly, quivering. Surely, he would explode at her in a minute. This would be funny. She looked through her phone’s screen and mused at what kind of filters or stickers she would put on this video for Instagrim. 

Curiously, the scientist didn’t try to take her phone, nor did he speak to her at all, even when she poked his shoulder. It was as though he was somewhere else. 

“G-god,” he mumbled, curling in on himself further, so that his head was in the crook of his elbows. His breath got faster and louder and he rocked backward and forward. 

“Shit...” He turned toward the driver’s-side window and partially lifted up his goggles with one hand, while reaching under the bag and wiping at his eyes with the other. 

Demencia instinctively angled herself to try to see through any gaps in the bag, or maybe up through where his hand was reaching in. She couldn’t see anything, and after a moment, something about the situation made her feel overly intrusive. Like someone looking between the cracks in a bathroom stall. She had never felt like she was doing something wrong before. Something was sucking the fun out of this freakout; perhaps it was the high-pitched gasps and sniffles, or the absolute jarring feeling she got from hearing someone express such emotion without seeing their face.

Dem frowned, turned off the video, and returned her phone back to her pocket. This actually wasn’t very funny. 

“Hey, come on…” she prodded. “We’ll make the delivery on time. You’re fine.”

Flug sat there for another minute, breathing deeply and quickly. Demencia started to feel awkward and considered leaving the van. She found herself in the rare position of deciding to think carefully on what to do next. 

Perhaps she should reach out to him. Slowly, she extended her arm to her co-worker. As her fingers were just about to touch his shoulder, he spoke, voice muffled by his arms. 

“We’re not always fine, you know.” 

Demencia retracted her hand, righteousness returning. “Actually, yes we are. You’re always worrying but nothing bad ever happens! You have to learn to relax!”

“Your logic is fallacious, Demencia,” Flug went on, finally lifting his head to look at her and leaning back in his seat. “You only  _ think  _ that people can go through collapsed buildings and car crashes and getting shot at because  _ you _ have never died doing these things. But the people who  _ have  _ died aren’t here to argue for the danger of these reckless acts.”

Augh. Another boring, high-and-mighty lecture. He was probably going to tell the story of survivorship bias and World War II planes blah blah blah, yeah, she knows. At least he was back to normal. Demencia rolled her eyes and crossed her arms, looking out her passenger-side window. “You can’t live your life afraid that you’re going to die all the time,” she griped. 

Flug huffed. “But I  _ am going to die all the time!”  _ he yelled as she turned back toward him. “You don’t know what it’s like to know that you have a very real chance of dying within the hour,” he continued, punctuating ‘you’ by jabbing a finger at her, then turning his palms toward each other and gesturing. “You’ve never been trapped in a crushed metal cabin with fire already consuming you, ok? You’ve never thought about cutting off your own arm to escape death. You’ve never shot someone because you knew they were doomed anyway. You would  _ never _ have thought about bringing  _ fireworks _ into a  _ car of explosives _ if you had ever felt that kind of heat, you immature buffoon!” 

Demencia was momentarily taken aback, although her instinct was to shout back. She opted for the logical route. “Yeah, and you  _ have  _ almost died in a plane crash, I know! But look at you, you’re fine. You should be stronger for it. Or at least you don’t need to think about it all the time.”

“Oh,” Flug responded quickly, while reaching down into his calf-high boot with his right hand. “Oh, I would  _ love _ to not think about it all the time, Demencia!” He pulled out a small, silver pistol and opened the magazine with a soft  _ click,  _ examining the contents to ensure that it was loaded. Then he clicked it closed and held it with his trigger finger high on the slide, gesturing as wildly as ever, but keeping the weapon pointed forward out the window. 

“I would  _ love _ to not work in a field where I’m at constant risk of attack, I would  _ love  _ to not have to see and  _ feel  _ the scars it left behind every time I take a shower,” he continued, with the exact theatrics of a freakout that Demencia had wanted, but not pleasing her at all. “I would  _ love  _ to get some sort of  _ strength _ from chronic pain, and to just  _ not think _ about the bloody aftermath of a crash when I am about to crash  _ again _ !”

Demencia was more focused on the gun that Flug had pulled out rather than exactly what he was saying. She knew he had it; they generally had a lot of weapons with them when they were out on assignment; she herself had a folded hunting knife in her boot. But what did he need it for now? 

After his rant, he fumbled to remove his seatbelt, left the van and slammed the door behind him. 

“Flug!” Demencia yelled, opening her door to follow. “Flug, where are you going!” 

The scientist yelled back from the driver’s side of the car, but she couldn’t hear him over the slopping sound of wet earth under her feet as she chased him. 


	4. Mercy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang deals with an irredeemably suffering buck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have you ever seen Bambi II? It’s the story of one serious character and one playful one. They teach each other the benefits of each characteristic. My story is similar, because it involves a deer.

“The deer, Dem. I told you.” 

Dem had just caught up to Flug, asking him to explain where he was going. They trudged through the mud, following a trail of blood until they came upon a big brown mass lying on his side. 

They both stood above the animal silently. His legs and the side on the ground were coated with mud, and blood trickled from his mouth and one broken antler. The whiskers around his eye twitched as he looked up at them, mouth open and panting. 

Flug positioned himself so that he was in front of the deer’s face, out of range of his front hooves. He noticed the front legs moving, but the entire back half of the animal was still. It coughed, wheezing out an inhuman noise and pink froth. 

The scientist put his hand on the buck’s face, the tips of his fingers resting between the animal’s eyes and palm on his nose. He listened to the creature breathe. Stared back, saw the whites of his eyes. 

Still crouching, he handed Demencia his gun. “Hold this.” Then he peeled off his jacket and gently wrapped it around part of the beast’s face, covering his eyes. The deer kicked with his front legs one more time, then relaxed. 

Flug reached up for the gun again, but Dem didn’t hand it back. “I can do it if you want,” she said. 

Flug swallowed and looked down at the animal. 

“Please.” 

Demencia moved to sit above the antlers as Flug held his jacket in place with one hand, and repetitively stroked the soft, dark muzzle with the other. 

“Wait,” he said quickly as she pointed the tip of the gun at the animal’s forehead.

“Do you want to look away?” 

“No, that’s not it. The angle is too low, you’ll miss his brain. Put it right between his antlers.” 

The assassin moved the pistol up higher, and Flug nodded. 

_ Crack.  _

The animal’s front legs pumped once, then curled up. Demencia removed the gun and there was only a spot of blood in its rough hair to show for it. Flug pulled his jacket up, and when he got it unwound from the stag’s head, it dropped lifelessly to the ground with a  _ thud _ . Its eyes were still open. Flug reached over and touched one of them with his thumb. It didn’t blink. 

“OK, we can go,” he declared, and stood up. 

But they didn’t leave. They just looked down at the animal for a moment. A slight breeze flowed through its whiskers and white, fluffy ear hairs. 

Several minutes passed; there was nowhere to go and nothing else to do. 

“I wonder exactly what was broken,” Flug said quietly. “I think something punctured its lung…” 

Demencia gazed at him for a minute. She could sense his curiosity, and her own building. She tried to suppress a smile in the somber atmosphere, reaching down to her boot and pulling out her folded knife. 

“Do you wanna find out?” 

Flug reached for the knife, still looking down at the kill.

“I do.” 


	5. Eviscerate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Disemboweling with a side order or character development.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Defeat Coronavirus - Stay Home - Read Fanfiction
> 
> Warning for LOTS of gore and blood, but no one is hurt or dies in this. Everyone just has a good time learning deer anatomy. And about each other.

“Do you know what is inside you, Demencia?” 

Flug clicked open the knife and kneeled down. He turned the blade, watching it glisten in the modest light. “Hold his front legs, please.”

Demencia obliged, taking the hooves of the deer carcass in her hands and holding them straight out toward herself, exposing the animal’s white belly. It was still warm.

“I can hardly understand why seeing inside a person or animal is considered so upsetting to people,” Flug continued, using one hand to grip skin of the animal’s abdomen like the shirt of a subordinate. He slid the blade through the skin under his fist then let go of his grip on the skin, bringing the knife up to slice open the buck’s torso. The pair watched in silence as the doctor revealed a white film with almost no blood. 

“This is what we are made of. Flesh, viscera, offal, it is who we are.”

He gripped the inside of the skin, pulling it open like a curtain obscuring a spring day, and cut again through the white film. Steam rose from the insides into the cool air as he revealed what looked like pale balloons. 

Demencia, wide-eyed, pointed at dark coils in the exposed abdomen. “What is that?” 

“This is the large intestine,” he explained, grabbing a fistful and pulling it out. It was still attached at both ends, but there was enough thickly coiled that it was as though he had simply pulled out a handful of spaghetti. “It’s funny how it just falls out. Everything else is sort of attached to something.” 

Suddenly, the scientist paused. Demencia watched him curiously, bloody knife in one hand and intestines in another. He looked like a psychopath. Not that that would be a mischaracterization. 

In the reflection of his frozen goggles, she saw something moving on the road behind her: a white truck, the driver sitting high enough that he could, should he turn his head, see over the grass and witness their dissection. 

It passed without incident, and Dr. Flug resumed his cutting. 

“Sorry for the pause. Sometimes people will come and bother you when they see you covered in blood.” 

Demencia dropped the forelegs and shuffled to sit next to him, to get a better angle of seeing inside. “Why does anyone care if we’re gross? We do plenty of terrible things. We’re not even hurting anything.” 

“Right?” Flug agreed, and reached inside with both arms, nearly his entire forearms deep in entrails. He grabbed onto something with one hand and sliced with the other, then pulled out something red and squishy. “Look, I can yank his kidney right out,” he said, tossing the organ playfully up and down in one hand. “He doesn’t care. No harm done.”

Demencia smiled at the absurdity of seeing the normally over-serious scientist playing with a kidney as though it were a toy. She reached over to the large intestine and pulled it over her head. “So wearing these intestines like a necklace is no problem?”

“Demencia,” he started, placing the kidney in the grass beside them. “Something so long will drag on the floor. It would be much more stylish to wrap it a few times anyway. May I?” 

She grinned and nodded as he wrapped the large intestines around her neck like an infinity scarf, getting blood on her shirt and in her hair. Then he cut the ends of the organ so they were no longer attached to the carcass, and they swung freely from her shoulders. “There,” the scientist declared, crossing his arms, getting blood on the inside of his elbows. “Now that’s villain fashion.”

With that, he continued to skin the carcass, revealing its ribcage. There was a spot of blood around the right side of its ribs, indicating a contusion that he couldn’t see from the outside. He pressed at the area with his fingers. 

“Ah, I think I found the problem,” he diagnosed. De-fleshing part of the area to expose it better, he found that four of the ribs on that side had shattered, folded underneath each other at the breaks. He cut out the inner, bottom parts of the ribs and flicked them to the side, manhandling the remains. 

“It looks like these ribs broke and punctured the lung,” he continued. “That’s why the thing was coughing up his own blood. He was bleeding into his lung.”

“Oh,” Demencia mused, leaning over with her new grotesque jewelry. “That explains why people cough up blood when I kick them hard enough in the chest.” 

“It could be,” Flug said, slowly working a rib piece from the chest. “There are a variety of injuries that can cause that reaction.” 

“Huh.” Dem reached over and yanked the rib out, tearing muscle with it. “Why does it take people so long to die when you shoot them in the gut? Sometimes they don’t die at all.”

“There are a lot of complex organs in the abdomen, and some are more important than others,” the scientist explained. He pulled out what looked like a white balloon from the inside of the deer and drove the knife into it, revealing green, steaming goo. “If you hit someone in the stomach, contents can leak all over the inside of their body. The stomach is full of bacteria and can easily mess up and infect the other organs.” 

“Aha, sick!” Demencia took the sac and turned it inside-out, spilling the gunk on the ground. Flug watched her explore the anatomy. 

“Hey,” she continued. “How do you know so much about bodies?” 

“I know about everything, Dem,” he responded proudly.

“That’s even weirder. How do you seem to know about  _ everything _ ?”

“Well,” he responded, leaning back and casually wiping the knife on the grass. “I spent a lot of my life reading and, when I could, taking things apart and putting them together again.” 

“OK, so you learned about mammal anatomy. And sentient botany. And robotics, and math, and gene-editing. And Mandaranin, and flute? There’s no way you had enough time for everything.” 

Flug put the knife down and looked at his blood-covered knuckles. “I had time to learn everything because I wasn’t doing much else. I didn’t exactly socialize growing up. I never really had fun.”

“Oh Flug. What’s the point of living if you don’t have fun?”

The scientist shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, a deep well of knowledge comes in handy, but,” he looked back up at her. “I kind of wish I were more like you, with more experience  _ doing things _ instead of just learning about them.” 

“Things like  _ this? _ ” Dem responded, throwing the empty stomach at her partner. It hit his chest with a  _ splat,  _ and she giggled. “Come on, it won’t hurt you!”

The scientist looked down at his shirt, wet with green and red from having wiped his hands on it. 

Then he picked up the kidney from beside him and threw it back. She ducked to the side and it hit her shoulder, and she squealed in delight. 

“Organ fight!” she giggled, and picked up something unidentified from the cavity. She tried to toss it to her friend, but it stopped short. 

“It’s still attached,” Flug explained. “Like I said, these things are stuck up in the body.” He reached for a dark red, triangular piece and sliced it away from the rest of the carcass.

Demencia started standing to run from the impending organ attack, but Flug stopped again and put the organ down. He turned his head as he followed something up in the sky. Dem looked too, and saw it was a flying Hatbot delivering to them a windshield and supplies. 

The pair stood, and Flug reached out his bloody hand to the woman wearing intestines around her neck. “It looks like we have to get back to work on the van. Shall we?”

Dem grinned and took his hand, then came closer and locked arms with him. “Whatever you say, Einstein.” 

The bizarre pair walked arm-in-arm back to the car, leaving the disemboweled creature behind. 

“That was...fun,” Flug said, a little hop in his steps to match with Demencia’s. “Please don’t set off fireworks in the car again, or near me at all, that was very upsetting for me. But, if you ever wanted to eviscerate another body, count me in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think it's odd and kind of sad that these villains have all these nemeses, but no friends. They don't even like each other! (With the exception of Flug and 505.) So I wrote about them learning to respect each other a little bit more. They would be so much more powerful if they got along, Brain and Brawn. 
> 
> Anyway if you liked reading Flug and Dem bond a little emotionally, here's a short one-shot about what happens years after they learn to get along. And fall in love and stuff: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21077564


End file.
